


motivators and bonding tape

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Movie: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, especially ben solo, the millennium falcon as a metaphor for the solos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27144124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: The news rolled in of Kylo Ren’s unmatched reign of terror, of one dark victory after another blazing through the galaxy.A feeling pulled Finn to crouch down and look under the Falcon’s Dejarik gaming table. On the sticky undersurface, he discovered an old wad of gum and a set of graffitied tally marks, a record of games long-past.Chewie: 4Ben: 9
Relationships: Finn & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Millennium Falcon & Finn, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18
Collections: Finnlo-Focused Multiship Anthology 2020, My favorites





	motivators and bonding tape

“It’s the motivator!”

Rey popped up from under the _Falcon’s_ floor grates, machinery smoking all around her. 

“How bad is it?”

“If we want to live, not good.”

Alarms blared from every direction, and if Finn dared close his eyes he might’ve believed himself back on the _Finalizer,_ in the aftermath of one of Kylo Ren’s explosions. 

“If we don't patch it up,” she gasped, “the propulsion tank will overflow and flood the ship with poisonous gas!”

As Finn scrambled for repair tools the smoke stung him, acrid just like the fumes that always rose from Ren’s wreckage. The other troopers had marveled at his rage, at the torrent of darkness that overflowed its bounds, inexorably propelling their leader towards some inevitable triumph. Yet Finn had sensed something when he closed his eyes– or imagined it, more likely. 

A hurricane wailing, potentially deadly. Utterly stripped of words, of purpose or motivation.

.

The next time Finn boarded the _Falcon,_ Han Solo was dead. It felt right to mourn him, the fallen war hero of the Rebellion, and indeed an odd melancholy settled into Finn’s heart. A second later, he realized he wasn’t thinking of Han Solo at all.

He must have imagined it: a vision of a phantom in black, stealing down the _Falcon’s_ halls one month back. Kylo Ren– once Ben Solo– stealing an illicit glance at his childhood, frozen on the cockpit threshold as the ground tilted underfoot, the compression of his black mask and armor suddenly suffocating.

But Finn hadn’t been around then. He’d been with Han and Rey at that particular moment, stealing around Starkiller. Logically speaking, he had no reason to believe Kylo Ren had stepped foot on the _Falcon_ in years.

Call it a feeling.

.

Finn awakened. 

The _Falcon_ ’s interior was dark. The Resistance rested, safe for now as they hurtled through hyperspace, the exhausted survivors snatching what sleep they could after Crait. Rey snored lightly, slumped on Finn’s shoulder, and he untangled himself with care.

Stepping over another soldier, he made his way down a hallway, drawn to an ache somewhere nearby.

He found General Organa alone in shadow, a pair of welding goggles dangling from one hand.

“Something wrong, general?”

“The valve system,” she explained after a moment. “It reduces pressure on the motivator, if you can engage it.”

“If?”

She gestured at a lever tilted askew. “Han and I never did get that thing straight.”

Her voice was weary, sardonic. 

Up flitted an image in Finn’s brain, no doubt still half-asleep and dreaming: Han’s hands rough on hers, trying to help her fit the lever into place until she pushed him away.

.

The feelings didn’t stop.

Grief that wasn’t Finn’s haunted every corner of the _Falcon._ Flashes of a princess and a scoundrel, of a wife and a husband and an ink-haired wisp of a boy who dashed once around the ship, radiant with life and laughter. The news rolled in of Kylo Ren’s unmatched reign of terror, of one dark victory after another blazing through the galaxy, and a feeling pulled Finn to crouch down and look under the _Falcon’s_ Dejarik gaming table. On the sticky undersurface, he discovered an old wad of gum and a set of graffitied tally marks, a record of games long-past.

Chewie: ||||

Ben: ||̸|| ||||

.

The alarms were wailing. 

It was a common occurrence now, warning lights flashing, speakers screeching out abrupt protests at all hours, refusing to halt for days after all visible damage had been repaired. Sometimes it seemed like the _Falcon_ was complaining at random, out of spite or sadistic pleasure, just to torture anyone unlucky enough to be nearby.

Poe looked at the console, all its lights blinking arrhythmically in urgent and incomprehensible patterns, and he threw up his hands. Rey worked longer, huddled down in the engine room and scowling intently at the _Falcon’s_ innards. Finn sat beside her and joined her in her studies, wondering at the mass of wires. They were criss-crossed either by an ingenious logic that entirely eluded him or by mistake, singed by electric overloads and twisted and worn down by years of misuse. 

He wondered if she felt it too.

.

Rey identified the controller switch for the technical alarm system. She looked at Poe, who hit it without hesitation.

“No more false alarms,” he declared, grinning wide at the newfound silence.

.

“Dammit, those TIEs nearly got us!” 

Poe stalked out of the cockpit after another near-fatal mission. The game had gotten deadlier now that the Order could track ships through hyperspace. And though Rey and Poe warred for control of the cockpit, both had gotten bolder in their maneuvering, spinning and diving and speeding beyond all known laws of physics. The _Falcon_ had obeyed their every command, creaking with the strain.

Finn remained behind and waited for the astromech droids to roll in like clockwork and start slapping patches on the _Falcon._ He worked beside them now after every disastrous mission, applying reel after reel of bonding tape, relying equally on knowledge and some persistent, irrational instinct. Carefully, he felt his way around the _Falcon’s_ inner workings, hands gentle on the dents and burns, until he knew them intimately. 

It was a delicate patchwork of mismatched parts. Remade by one master after another, it had warped into a fragile state, objectively ready to collapse at a single touch. Sometimes Finn wondered to himself how the whole contraption was still flying, how it could rise to every new impossible challenge thrown its way, and concluded it was running on stubbornness alone.

“It’s a pile of temperamental junk.”

Poe’s raised voice filtered from outside, loud in Finn’s ear though he was logically too far to hear. He put aside his tools and moved towards the exit.

“It’s the _Solo ship,”_ replied Rey. “It’ll do what we need it to do.”

“That last motivator failure left us wide open. It’s like it _wanted_ to strand us in Order territory.”

“The _Falcon’s_ doing its best.” Finn charged down the ramp and into the conversation, oddly defensive.

“Yeah?” retorted Poe. “Well, we’re at war. Its ‘best’ isn’t good enough.”

“Are you just complaining, or do you have a real solution?” she demanded.

“We just raided an Order shipyard. Why don’t we slap a new compressor on it?”

“Fine,” scoffed Rey just as Finn exclaimed, “No way!”

They both turned to glare at him. He stood his ground, a protective instinct flaring.

“That was the whole problem in the first place, back on Jakku,” he said. “Remember? Rey, you fixed the _Falcon_ by _bypassing_ the compressor?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “But that compressor was from Unkar Plutt, it was terrible–”

“There’s no such thing as a _nice compressor._ Han _Solo_ didn’t want one, he said it over-stressed the hyperdrive.”

“But if we get a new one–”

 _“You_ said it too!” Finn interrupted her, borne by a storm of unnamable feelings. _“And_ Han Solo said the way the hyperdrive was going, it’d explode and blow us up across three systems!”

“With all due respect, Finn,” Poe cut in, “you’re not a pilot. Where is this coming from?”

“I–” Finn broke off, breathing hard without knowing why, bursting with fondness for a ramshackle ship without _knowing why._ “Call it a feeling.”

.

Poe and Rey installed the compressor.

.

Finn sat by the _Falcon’s_ hyperdrive sometimes, oddly calm amidst the whirring coils. He ran his fingers down the smooth outside of the hyperdrive. Perhaps he was just imagining that its glow had dimmed post-compressor. Its lights still pulsed under his fingers, like a faint heartbeat. 

Sometimes he closed his eyes, and it seemed he could still hear it: Ren’s desperate wailing, unmotivated and unmoored, glowing faint in the Force.

.

The compressor went down.

It became a regular practice, Chewie and Rey wrangling with the _Falcon_ after every mission, trying to jam the compressor back on. Time and time again the _Falcon_ threw the compressor off, sparks flying, electric current carving out alternate pathways, fires breaking out at every short-circuiting seam. Even as Finn dashed about dousing flames, his heart stormed with pride, as if the ship couldn’t contain all the light within it.

.

The _Falcon_ held together.

The Resistance dragged it through the Final Order’s brief reign, though it groaned with every jump to lightspeed, though Poe’s newfound taste for hyperspeed skipping nearly smashed it to pieces. It held together, with flickering shields and banged-up walls, to preserve every life within.

.

After Exegol, Finn pressed his forehead to the hyperdrive and wondered if he was only imagining the new, vast silence.

.

The _Falcon_ held together through three further battles, as the Resistance routed the last dregs of the First Order. It flew high and glorious, zooming through the blue of hyperspace, weaving through five full squadrons of TIEs. With impossible grace, without a single shudder or spark, it rescued Finn and Rey and Poe from one ambush, then another. It swooped almost without direction, almost by its own volition, resolutely holding together until it delivered them back on Ajan Kloss after the final surrender. They ran down the ramp to the celebration, fireworks already bursting high above them.

Finn left the revel early, aware the _Falcon_ needed its post-battle repairs. He picked out what he needed from the supply office and returned _,_ well-equipped...

At the top of the ramp waited darkness.

Every light in the _Falcon_ was powered off– every lamp, every console, even the emergency glow strips. Finn made his way forward by feel, guided equally by instinct and his own intimate memory of this place, descending below the grates to the hyperdrive.

It had gone dark. He flicked the switch beside it again and again and again, with no effect.

Whenever Finn had tried to picture the end, the _Falcon’s_ hyperdrive always exploded dramatically. It rebelled against a lifetime of abuse and scattered its parts and passengers alike across the galaxy. He’d never thought it could pass with a whimper, with achingly convenient timing, as if it had to know they were all delivered to safety before it could at last let itself die.

Finn closed his eyes. Knelt in instinctive homage. Reached into the Force.

.

At first there was only dark and crushing silence, stripped now of even the ship’s quiet hum.

Then sounded the alarm.

He rose once more, drawn straight to the cockpit. Rey was curled on the copilot's seat with her knees drawn up to her face. She sobbed in silence, whole body shuddering with every breath.

He stopped in the doorway and wondered what he could possibly say. 

"...It's all about Ben, right?"

And she answered.

In the darkness she whispered of a man so filled with light his skin couldn’t contain it, rays shining out the cracks in his mask. She whispered of a kiss so charged it carved her heart in two. She whispered of a heart so big, so stubborn it refused to give out, no matter how many masters tried to warp and compress it, not until he’d delivered her to safety.

In the Force, he heard her hurricane wailing.

Finn lingered in the doorway just where Kylo Ren had, holding tight to every word she spoke. When she finished he looked down at his hands, illuminated by pale moonlight. 

“You’re the last Jedi,” he murmured. “And you’ve got the ancient texts. If he could resurrect you...”

“I can’t do it.”

In one hand Finn held a wrench to remove that damn compressor. In the other, he gripped a fresh reel of bonding tape.

“We’ll save the _Falcon_ , and we’ll save Ben Solo,” he said at last. “Call it a feeling.”


End file.
